Agents & automation

Tool-using AI systems, autonomous workflows and what they actually automate.

2 articles

Analysis: what actually changed when AI agents moved from demo to production

Demos run a short happy path once with a human watching. Production runs thousands of variations unattended, where per-step error rates compound and an unbounded permission scope turns a wrong decision into an incident. The deployments that work narrow the scope, verify each step cheaply, and gate every irreversible action.

Aug 19, 2026Updated Aug 22, 20264 min read

Agents & automation

What is an AI agent, and how is it different from a chatbot?

An AI agent is a language model that has been given tools it can call, a goal to pursue, and permission to take several steps without asking a human between each one. A chatbot answers a question and stops; an agent keeps acting until it decides the goal is met or it runs out of budget.

Aug 18, 2026Updated Aug 22, 20264 min read